In PDP bastion, Mehbooba faces trouble
The situation in J& K seems to have gone totally out of control for Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.
South Kashmir, particularly Anantnag, has been a political bastion of her Peoples’ Democratic Party ( PDP) and it was from here that it won most of its seats in the 2014 J& K Assembly elections.
Earlier elected to Lok Sabha from her home constituency Anantnag, Ms Mufti also won the recently held by- poll from a seat from the region that had fallen vacant after the death of her father and PDP patron, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, in January this year.
Over the weekend, almost entire south Kashmir was on the boil following the killing of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the new- age poster boy of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir. He, along with two close associates, was killed by security forces in a gun battle in Anantnag’s Kokernag area on Friday, sparking off widespread protests and violence in the Valley.
Particularly Anantnag and neighbouring districts of Kulgam, Pulwama and Shopian have been on the edge and the protests and clashes have spread to other areas, forcing the authorities to clamp curfew in the entire Valley which has a population of over five million.
In anticipation of a flare up, the Chief Minister had reportedly asked the top officers of the security forces to ensure restraint on the ground while dealing with the situation. But the death toll in security forces firings and other actions is going up with each passion hour with the latest figure being 30 – all but one of these being reported from south Kashmir.
Scores of others are being treated in hospitals and most of them have received above- waist bullet or pellet injuries.
Also, at least one policeman has been killed and over 100 injured in mob violence. In Tral, the hometown of Wani deep inside Pulwama, tens of thousands of mourners turned up at his funeral.
The upheaval has pushed Ms Mufti into the most difficult situation of her political career and she will find the killings hard to justify much less when, as an opposition leader, she would use every single death in security forces’ actions, even that of a militant commander, to slam her political bête noire and then Chief Minister, Mr Omar Abdullah.
On Saturday, it was Mr Abdullah’s turn to pay her back in the same coin. He criticised the handling of the situation and also cautioned: “Mark my words - Burhan’s ability to recruit into militancy from the grave will far outstrip anything he could have done on social media.” Many saw in the assertion a plea that instead of being killed, Wani should have been captured alive.
People within and outside J& K turned to social networking sites to endorse the view or express similar opinions following the spurt in violence in the Valley. In another tweet, Mr Abdullah stated: “After many years I hear slogans for ‘ Azadi’ resonate from the mosque in my uptown Srinagar locality. Kashmir’s disaffected got a new icon yesterday.”